Pop Pop! two gunshots to the back of the head “He’s good and dead now” says an officer

On to the next room pop pop pop pop 4 others wounded

Then beaten up, dragged into the streets, and arrested

For what? Aggravated assault and attempted murder Of who? The 14 police officers who raided a home and killed two friends.

These powerful people made us think that the Soviets were the enemies. That communism and socialism would spread like a disease ruining democracy and taking away our freedoms.

But I see no democracy.

It’s all a lie. When we think we’ve won when we think we’ve been heard its because they let us have a victory. They’ve created the illusion of choice. They make us believe we have a voice but when your voice threatens their power over you, they infiltrate your movements. They threaten your family. They create artificial problems to distract your people, disrupt the cohesion, the progress. They lie. They steal. They murder. They torture. They invade. They bomb. They occupy. They hold you hostage and enslave your leaders. They publish fake news stories and construct events to make you think the threat is elsewhere. They deprive you of resources like education to keep you from learning and knowing and awakening to who they really are.

They are not here to create a just world or to endow all people with rights to food, and water, and education, and safety, and justice. They are not here to encourage love or prosperity or collaboration or spiritual growth. No! . . their purpose is to keep us all trapped in their apparatus of oppression, of confusion, of misery. . . held up by constructs of race, gender, beauty, politics, and economics that torment us.

I am not the only one who has dreamt of freedom

Yet I see no one who is unrestrained

The power-obsessed cop is not free of the ego

The FBI director is not free from his crimes

The imperialist is not free of sickness

The President is not free from his lies

The white supremacist is not free of hate

The Black Woman is not free of pain

People are not free from each other

I see no one who is free

And plenty who have bled for me

Freedom agonizes the stars because they know there are no answers

They know this world is fiction–a novel with no ending, no satisfying finale

So when freedom woke me up last night to ask me why I have forsaken it.

I said, “Why should I dream in a world where dreams whether left on coffee tables or spoken on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial WILL strip you naked and spill your secrets to your enemies?”

When I was a child this dream I call blue eyes looked at me and said, “I dare you to chase me.”

It was then that I should have known that dreams are not for the living.

Freedom is not for the living.

Not in this land.

You take what you get and wait for someone else’s tragedy, someone else’s undisciplined, uncaring, mischievous dream to carry you on its wings.